Charles McGrath writes a piece on Tom Wolfe and his new novel for the New York Times Magazine. Wolfe has a good eye is a good writer, and is an odd man who many on the left don’t like, therefore he is worth reading. His new novel is a chronicle of the American university, "a campus novel on steroids," says McGrath. I bet it will be worth reading. If you go to Amazon
(and click down) you can listen to Wolfe talk about the novel for a few minutes.
Also check out this NY Times Magazine story about Marilynne Robinson, who has just published a novel, Gilead, that (among other things) deals with John Brown and the abolition movement:
A Moralist of the Midwest. She sounds like a novelist for our times precisely because she does not write out of the zeitgeist. Her publisher also happens to be Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which published Wolfe’s latest.